It seems fitting that the director of
Central Intelligence should be the first casualty
of an election where both sides had more to lose
than to gain by mentioning foreign policy. My
admiration for General David Petraeus was
grudging, but he was well-qualified

for the job: a
general who can manipulate his own masters can
jerk the chains of foreign leaders as well.

Whether Petraeus' personal indiscretions
required his resignation or President Barack Obama
put paid to a Republican holdover is not yet
clear. It doesn't matter much, for the screens are
going dark in Washington. After four years of
American strategic withdrawal, and a vast display
of apathy from the voters, America is a
diminishing factor in world affairs. Americans
will learn of critical developments after the fact
if at all, and its intelligence services will
continue to devolve into a sort of Work Progress
Administration for failed academics.

As I
wrote in this space in May 2010, "Petraeus' surge
of 2007-2008 drastically reduced the level of
violence in Iraq by absorbing most of the
available Sunni fighters into an American-financed
militia, the 'Sons of Iraq', or Sunni Awakening.
With American money, weapons and training, the
remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime have turned
into a fighting force far more effective than the
defunct dictator's state police."

It was a
doubly clever stroke, winning with cash what could
not be won with bullets. Aligning with the
remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime was the
right approach (first advocated in 2004 by Marc
Ericson on this web site - see Why
Saddam's arrest did matter, Asia Times Online,
January 24, 2004). Of course, it set the stage for
an escalating civil war in the future. That is a
defect in the policy only if its author expects
something other than another iteration of
violence.

Petraeus perpetrated a fraud by
elevating this gambit into a counterinsurgency
doctrine and accepting the accolades of grateful
and relieved Republicans. Applied to Afghanistan,
the doctrine failed miserably; the Taliban took
the American money, like the Iraqi Sunnis, but -
unlike the Iraqis - they continued to kill
Americans.

Petraeus became a Republican
hero by paying off the Sunni opposition, creating
the illusion of stability in Iraq long enough for
the outgoing George W Bush administration to claim
a victory of sorts. The neo-conservatives clove to
Petraeus even when he dutifully repeated in 2010
the Obama administration's view that a deal with
Iran over nuclear weapons depended on a peace
agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

The Petraeus cult in the Republican Party
was to no avail. The Iraq occupation remains so
unpopular that Mitt Romney meticulously avoided
proposing any change in foreign policy during his
third debate with President Obama. That may not
have cost him the election, but it surely did not
add to his stature as a prospective leader. The
fact that foreign policy barely merited mention in
the presidential campaign suggests that the
nation-building blunder soured Americans to
activist foreign policy altogether. Lack of will
has become America's overriding strategic
limitation, a fact that its competitors and
adversaries will note carefully.

Petraeus'
disgrace adds insult to injury. The Republicans
must feel like the erstwhile Comintern chief Bela
Kun, a protege of the Bolshevik leader Gregory
Zinoviev. When Stalin crushed Zinoviev in 1926,
Kun complained, "For the past 10 years I've been
kissing the wrong ass."

Frauds are just
what intelligence agencies are expected to
perpetrate, though. Petraeus was just the sort of
thief it takes to catch one. No matter that he
bungled his personal secrets, apparently using an
ordinary webmail account - not disposable
cellphones, not even an encryption service like
Hushmail - to communicate with Mrs Broadwell of
the Dickensian appellation. Like the subject of
last year's premiere sex scandal, Dominique
Strauss-Kahn, the CIA director displayed
guilelessness in intimate affairs quite at odds
with his professional skills.

No matter.
Even in Petraeus' capable hands, American
intelligence was hobbled by circumstance. It is a
myth that intelligence agencies steal secrets by
intercepting communications and suborning spies.
On the contrary: they obtain intelligence if and
when someone wishes to give them intelligence.
Russia spied successfully on the United States and
England because Marxists intellectuals thought
Russia should have American secrets.

America obtained Russian secrets towards
the end of the Cold War because Russian
intelligence officers, disillusioned with the evil
and incompetent communist system, thought that the
United States should have the relevant
information. I am reliably informed that the US
did not recruit a single Soviet agent of
importance during the last dozen years of the Cold
War; all of its intelligence coups came from
walk-ins. Moral as well as strategic superiority
is a magnet for information; little else does much
good.

Intelligence services uncover
information not by gazing at stars but by stirring
up muck. Sometimes the muck is mined. Whatever
ultimately comes to light about the death of
ambassador Chris Stevens and his guards at
Benghazi, it almost certainly will show that the
intelligence failure - the failure to anticipate
and respond to an organized attack on an American
installation - stemmed from a policy failure.

The Obama administration's fixed idea of
engaging radical Islamists will have the same
result as trying to cuddle with your pet scorpion.
Whether ambassador Stevens ran into blowback from
a plan to run Libyan weapons to jihadists in
Syria, as former CIA officer Clare Lopez
conjectures, we may or may not find out. What is
clear, though, is that the United States finds
itself within stinging range of some nasty
creatures in consequences of delusional policy.

There simply isn't any reason to bring
information to Washington these days. The Obama
administration cannot be argued out of a failing
policy, and the path of least resistance for
America's allies and adversaries alike is to humor
the obsessives on the Potomac and work around
them.

After four years of strategic
withdrawal, and the prospect of another four with
the new "flexibility" that President Obama
promised then Russian president Dmitry Medvedev
over a mike accidentally left open last March, the
world's secondary powers are left to their own
devices. Every one of them will play a double
game.

Israel will make its own decision as to
whether to attack Iran's nuclear capacity, on the
strength of military criteria that outsiders are
poorly prepared to judge;

Russia will threaten to arm Iran with its best
surface-to-air missiles while negotiating with
Israel;

China will maintain its alliance with Pakistan
but deal ruthlessly with Pakistani-supported
Muslim separatists in Xinjiang, the so-called East
Turkistan;

Turkey will threaten Iran over its
intervention with Syria while bartering billions
of dollars in gold to the Islamic Republic each
month to help it beat the boycott;

Saudi Arabia will continue to fund Turkey as a
bulwark against Iran while sabotaging Turkey's
efforts to put the Muslim Brotherhood in power in
Syria; and

Germany will affirm its commitments to Europe
and North Atlantic Treaty Organization while
quietly diversifying its energy sources towards
Russia. With the attenuation of American power,
the era of transparency in world affairs is coming
to an end. Because America is a democracy and even
covert actions must be explained to an elected
Congress, it is difficult to hide most of
America's actions. When American action is
dominant, the rest of the world spends most of its
time responding to American action, such that
careful examination of public sources puts leading
events in relief.

The rest of the world is
governed to a greater or lesser extent by elites
who are accountable only to themselves. America no
longer has a veto on major events, because it no
longer cares to intervene in most theaters of
world policy, and the secondary powers therefore
have no incentive to inform Washington of what
they intend.

The screens are slowly going
dark. We will look back at the first decade of the
new millennium with nostalgia, for the worst sort
of American blundering will seem benign in
retrospect compared with the cynical
double-dealing of second-rate powers. The
soldier's chorus that concludes Schiller's play
Wallenstein's Camp comes to mind:

(Freedom has
disappeared from the world/And perfidy rules in
its place/And there's nothing left but masters
and slaves/Of the cowardly human race).
Other powers are
taking over military and police roles that once
fell to Washington by default.

A minor
example is worth citing: the International
Maritime Bureau last month reported that pirate
attacks on commercial shipping had fallen to just
70 during the first nine months of 2012, compared
to 199 in the same period of 2011. The Maritime
Security Review reported on September 24,
"International navies have stepped up pre-emptive
action against pirates, including strikes on their
bases on the Somali coast."

I am informed
that Chinese naval vessels have sent landing
parties of marines on shore to retaliate against
the pirates' villages. Unlike the Obama
administration, China has little concern for
Muslim sensibilities. A significant strategic
problem (and an important source of terrorist
funding) is coming under control because of
China's willingness to deal harshly with the
locals.

Nor does America's technological
prowess ensure continued influence.

American military technology is slowly
falling behind the curve. Former Pentagon official
Jack David and retired Air Force General Michael
Dunn wrote in the Wall Street Journal on November
6, "Russian and Chinese aircraft, flown by Indian
pilots in exercises, have already bested the US
Air Force's fourth-generation aircraft, F-15s and
F-16s. Both Russia and China have developed
fifth-generation fighters similar to the Air
Force's F-22 and F-35." Meanwhile the air force's
inventory of planes is dwindling and aging
rapidly.

It is a good time for General
Petraeus to leave. His greatest success in the
mirror-world of intelligence was deluding his own
masters into believing that they were in control
of events in Iraq. He was unsuccessful in
Afghanistan; it may emerge that he failed
catastrophically in Libya.

Before America
can restore the functioning of its intelligence
services, it must have a strategy in furtherance
of which intelligence is sought. Such a strategy
requires leaders who are more concerned about
American interests than about the reputations of
their employers.